What Is the World’s Oldest Name?

Ancient city of Uruk

Based on the way trends shift over time, you can often guess how old someone is by their name. Elmer, Willard, Fred, and Harold are currently the male names with the oldest median ages, so men with those names today will generally be older; for women, the names with the oldest median ages are Gertrude, Mildred, and Opal. These, of course, are all still in use today. But what is the oldest known name of all time, period?

The answer to that question can be found on a collection of tablets from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk (in modern-day Iraq), which date back to approximately 3100 to 3000 BCE, more than 5,000 years ago. The text inscribed on the tablets describes transactions from the ancient Sumerian Temple of Inanna, as well as the name of the person who recorded the transactions: Kushim.

The tablets were written in cuneiform, a Sumerian script that evolved from pictographs. While pictographs were rudimentary line drawings consisting of shapes imprinted into clay using a fine-pointed tool, cuneiform was a more complex script that emerged around 3200 BCE when a wedge-shaped reed stylus replaced the pointed tool. Instead of pictures, a variety of angular shapes could be made with the stylus, representing words, sounds, and syllables.

Cuneiform tablets were often used for bureaucratic records, and historians believe that Kushim was likely an accountant or government official. On the Uruk tablet, now known as MS 1717, an unusual combination of two symbols appear: the cuneiform symbols for the sounds “Ku” and “Sim.” Both sounds are known to scholars, but there is no known cuneiform word that corresponds to the combination of the two sounds. That fact, combined with the positioning of the symbols at the end of a sentence, suggests that the cuneiform “Ku-Sim” is the name of the individual responsible for the transaction recorded.

The Schøyen Collection in Oslo, where some of the Uruk tablets are housed, displays a translation of one of the transactions: “Beer production: 134,813 litres of barley to be delivered over 3 years (37 months) to the government official Kushim responsible for the brewery at the Inanna Temple in Uruk.” The MS 1717 tablet is also notable for another reason: Its inscriptions are the first known depiction of an industrial process.

Can we be certain that Kushim was truly someone’s name, though? While there is room for argument that Kushim may simply be a job title, there is additional evidence on the tablet in support of it being a name. The word “Sanga” appears in the text immediately preceding Kushim, which is a word known to historians as a Mesopotamian job title. This makes it unlikely that Kushim is a title, as it would be redundant in context.

It’s worth noting that historians do not consider Kushim to be the first-ever given name, but rather a contender for the oldest given name that exists on record — tracking the earliest human history doesn’t tend to yield simple and definitive answers. To that end, there are a few other possible oldest names, a few of which appear on a tablet discovered in the ancient Sumerian city of Shuruppak (in modern-day Iraq). The Shuruppak tablet reads, “Two slaves held by Gal-sal” and then goes on to name them: “En-pap X and Sukkalgir.” Historians believe this artifact is likely one or two generations more recent than MS 1717, but in the context of thousands of years of antiquity, a timeframe of a few decades is difficult to prove with certainty. Another possible oldest name is the ancient Egyptian ruler Iry-Hor, who is thought to have lived contemporaneously to Kushim, Gal-sal, En-pap X, and Sukkalgir.

As for today, is there anywhere in the world where the name Kushim is still used? According to the demographics site Forebears, approximately 76 people currently have that name. It’s most common in Russia, but also appears in Uzbekistan. It’s the 2,168,711th most popular name in the world.